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Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

zdnet.com

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Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#251

Post by whateveracct »

cryptica wrote: post #247
whateveracct wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rofl you know someone is crypto-sick when they say fist currency only works for "a handful of rich people."

Freedom from corporate wage slavery and mind-numbing bureaucracy is of critical importance to me. If you're corporate cattle and you like it, then good for you but don't tell a slave that they're sick for not wanting to be a slave.

i recommend you use your technical skills to get a corporate remote job for 5 years. You can make some good coin in that time and honestly you won't have to work much. Definitely not cattle. You can probably spend the majority of your mindpower on your own interests and projects but still collect big corporate checks, bonuses, and stock.

I agree it grates on the soul. But it's a net win and only a temporary fleecing.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#252

Post by tnzm »

slver wrote: post #116
tnzm wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Works as well as anything. Which is to say, just barely well enough to keep going. And then there's the whole thing with how its scaling issues are mitigated via the platform dependency on the state's monopoly on violent enforcement. Emphasis on monopoly.

So the big problem in your opinion, is that we're not allowed to legally beat each other up like animals over property disputes. All right. By the way, I don't think blockchains allow you to beat up people, either.

The big problem, in my opinion, is that a lot of people think we'd inevitably be beating each other up like animals, if it wasn't for the powers that be, who kindly protect us from ourselves.

And it is already legal to beat up and kill each other over a property dispute. It just has to be a large enough dispute for the parties involved to be able to afford rebranding it as a "war".

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#253

Post by tnzm »

mumblemumble wrote: post #92
tnzm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but, from what I understand, when you have supply chain trust issues, they don't look like "oh gee someone edited a database record", they look more like https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-09/trader-bu ... >Normally, in such cases of non-delivery a trading house could make a claim against a cargo’s insurance policy. But Mercuria found that just one out of seven contracts used by the Turkish company to i…

Fair, though that would be a much more compelling observation if anyone had ever succeeded in implementing a full-fledged insurance policy in the form of a smart contract. I'm curious, for example, how you'd get an errors and omissions clause working in Etherium. Like, how would Ether arbitrate a claim against that policy? Assume, for the sake of argument, that hard AI has not been invented yet.

You're correct that hard AI would be necessary for the blockchain to perform autonomous arbitration in cases where human discretion is necessary.

In practice, this is solved by giving the contract the capability to query an external system (referred to as an oracle), which provides the results of the independent arbitration as an input to the contract.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#254

Post by tnzm »

namdnay wrote: post #117
tnzm wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments A and B meet and discuss some deal. Their agreement is recorded on a public append-only ledger, which is hosted by participants worldwide. If any party reneges on the deal, that's remembered by the public record too, where no amount of propaganda can erase it. Parties confirmed to be less trustworthy are subsequently afforded fewer compromises during negotiations. A NFT could also be minted, where people…

What does renege on the deal really mean though? usually in those situations both sides will claim that the other is reneging on the deal Engineering solutions based on binary ideas of true and false just don't apply to diplomacy or politics

Speaking as an engineer, that's what's wrong with diplomacy and politics!

EDIT: I define "reneging on the deal" as "acting as if the deal never happened".

The more governance decisions are recorded on the public record, the less opportunities there would be for parties to say "the other guy started it".

Also the deal could be set up to hurt both parties if they violate a predetermined condition. Maybe burn 5% of each party's GDP. Then they would be actually incentivized to collaborate.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#255

Post by tnzm »

slver wrote: post #116
tnzm wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Works as well as anything. Which is to say, just barely well enough to keep going. And then there's the whole thing with how its scaling issues are mitigated via the platform dependency on the state's monopoly on violent enforcement. Emphasis on monopoly.

So the big problem in your opinion, is that we're not allowed to legally beat each other up like animals over property disputes. All right. By the way, I don't think blockchains allow you to beat up people, either.

To add, it's also completely legal for the powers that be to treat you like an animal if you try to make yourself independent of them.

Unlike the existing system of governance, a blockchain doesn't have the mandate to beat up people.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#256

Post by tnzm »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #228
htrp wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "signed paper document" or a "treaty" is also meaningless without robust enforcement mechanisms.... or the instant it's in either side's interest to ignore.

That goes double for blockchains.

The keyword here is consensus. Using an append-only distributed public ledger to record your governance decisions (and be held accountable for them) is a lot like using a memory-safe language when programming. It induces non-negligible overhead, but prevents entire classes of opportunities for abuse.

The whole "blockchain-backed international treaty" example is admittedly a bit contrived though. It's kind of a "horseless carriage" thing - trying to explain to @markwkw that no "blockchain payments" would be necessary, by expanding on their mental model. (Maybe that's an unwise strategy, and I need to start just rudely dismissing people instead, but I'm not sure how that would help with comprehension)

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#257

Post by cyanydeez »

lars wrote: post #32

Similar to how "god of the gaps" arguments work, there's a "god of complexity" phenomenon in tech, where people will project infinite possibilities onto technology they don't understand. Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem. It lets you do distributed consensus among untrusted nodes in a setting where contributing compute power is economically incentivized (e.g. where there's mining). That…

blockchain can provide a proof of time and existince of digital data. thats not what nfts are sold as, but thats whats going on.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#258

Post by slver »

tnzm wrote: post #255
slver wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the big problem in your opinion, is that we're not allowed to legally beat each other up like animals over property disputes. All right. By the way, I don't think blockchains allow you to beat up people, either.

To add, it's also completely legal for the powers that be to treat you like an animal if you try to make yourself independent of them. Unlike the existing system of governance, a blockchain doesn't have the mandate to beat up people.

I prefer a subset of people who can beat me up for a subset of reasons, rather than all people for any reason.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#259

Post by slver »

tnzm wrote: post #252
slver wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the big problem in your opinion, is that we're not allowed to legally beat each other up like animals over property disputes. All right. By the way, I don't think blockchains allow you to beat up people, either.

The big problem, in my opinion, is that a lot of people think we'd inevitably be beating each other up like animals, if it wasn't for the powers that be, who kindly protect us from ourselves. And it is already legal to beat up and kill each other over a property dispute. It just has to be a large enough dispute for the parties involved to be able to afford rebranding it as a "war".

Do you know this saying "those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it". You're that saying.

Also "war" is the thing that happens between parties above which no legal frame or enforcement institution exists. Countries. There's no actual "international court" (there's the UN one, but it has no powers). This is why wars happen. So in fact, mentioning wars defeats your own point - yes, people will literally kill each other like savages when no legal repercussions exist. Wars show that.

Because we have no world government, we can only apply mitigation strategies like sanctions, diplomacy, economic interdependence. These work, but only until a true scarcity occurs, where taking someone else's stuff is a solution. Then it's back to wars.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#260

Post by tnzm »

slver wrote: post #258
tnzm wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add, it's also completely legal for the powers that be to treat you like an animal if you try to make yourself independent of them. Unlike the existing system of governance, a blockchain doesn't have the mandate to beat up people.

I prefer a subset of people who can beat me up for a subset of reasons, rather than all people for any reason.

Your boot, sir.
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